They came, they saw, and they fucking destroyed. A Life Once Lost, Car Bomb, This or the Apocalypse and Last Chance to Reason made for an awesome night of metal on Wednesday at Club Europa; big “thank you”s are in order to all the bands for coming to NYC to make our CMJ showcase a huge success.

Fred Pessaro of BrooklynVegan was on hand to capture all the rocking on film. Fred totally nailed the intense feeling of what it was like to watch A Life Once Lost and Car Bomb absolutely destroy this Polish nightclub, and he got a few lulz-worthy pics of This or the Apocalypse’s choreographed ballet stage moves. Unfortunately he didn’t catch Last Chance to Reason, but those guys came all the way from Maine and put on a phenomenal show; they have a very bright future ahead of them with Prosthetic Records. A big “thank you” is in order for Fred as well!

Check his pics after the jump.

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Fuck my life.

I always thought that Lemmy would be one of those people who was cool forever. At least from a creative standpoint — it’s hard for me to endorse his love of Nazi paraphernalia. But I never thought that Motorhead would do embarrass themselves the way so many of their peers have.

I was wrong.

The band has a recorded a slowed-down version of their signature song, “Ace of Spades,” and while I have nothing against that concept in theory — in fact, the finished version sounds pretty alright, if not exactly terrific — the fact that it was recorded specifically for a beer commercial makes me wanna rip the mole right off of Lemmy’s face. Seriously, dude? You hard up to pay the rent this month or something?

And thus, Lemmy earns his spot on my “All My Heroes Have Failed Me” list. Good work, dude.

-AR

Thanks: Charlie Farmer

Hard to believe it’s almost November already, but there ya have it. And while the bad news is that it’s only gonna get increasingly cold and dreary, the good news is that on November 9, Profound Lore will release Terminal, the debut full-length from Salome. If you’ve read my review, you already know that I think this album is fucking capital-”S” Sweet, and if you’ve listened to the already-released “Master Failure,” than you’re already excited to hear this monster.

Now our pals over at Brooklyn Vegan are streaming the title track, too. Seriously, the only reason not to check it out is if you hate yourself. You don’t hate yourself, do you? Oh, you do? Oh. Oh.

[long, awkward pause]

Well, listen to it anyway. Maybe then you’ll hate yourself a little less, ’cause at least you treated yourself to something cool. Then come back here and thank me for brightening your day a little. “Brightening” in this instance meaning “dooming.” Or whatever.

And while we’re on the topic of Salome, our friend “Grim” Kim Kelly also has a cool interview with drummer Aaron Deal over at Noisecreep — check it out.

-AR

So the upcoming Rock Band 3 apparently has a “pro guitar mode,” which will feature a new toy guitar that requires players to actually make chords and hits notes and pluck strings and stuff. Made in conjunction with Fender, you’ll even be able to plug these things into amps and play ‘em that way.

In theory, this should quiet some of the rhythm game naysayers who claims that Rock Band, Guitar Hero and their ilk discourage players from picking up real instruments, as these new “guitars” will actually require users to learn about notes, chords, scales, etc., instead of just pressing colored buttons. The flip side, though, is that players still won’t have to learn about things like tuning, and it’s not hard to imagine an “instrument” like this becoming to guitar playing what auto-tune has become to singing: a shortcut and a cheat.

Check out the video previewing Rock Band‘s lastest creation below, and then weigh in with your thoughts in our comments section.

-AR

Way back in January I named After the Burial’s as-yet-untitled album as my pick for our Albums That Will Fuck Your Face Off in 2010 series. It’s almost November now, but it’s finally time to let the face-fucking commence.

The album is called In Dreams, and Sumerian Records has announced that it’ll finally come out on November 23rd. Take an exclusive listen to the first track to be released from the album, “Bread Crumbs and White Stones,” below. For a track that clocks in at just 3 and a half minutes it displays a remarkable array of everything in After the Burial‘s sonic palette: it’s crushing, it’s melodic; there’s shred, there’s chug; it’s fast and it’s slow; it’s kinda hard to believe how short this song is given all that happens in it, and it’s a testament to why I like this band so much in the first place. And yes, it is most certainly fucking my face off. Have a listen, then tell us what you think in the comments.

[this streaming promotion has ended]

See also: this.

-VN

Thanks: Frank Rodriguez

I can see that The Damned Things are gonna be the next point of contention here at the MetalSucks Mansion. Vince likes ‘em, but they just sound like more more boring corporate rock to my ears. And a new track streaming on the band’s Facebook page, “Friday Night (Going Down In Flames),” isn’t doing much to change my mind. I don’t think the band is terrible or anything; I just feel really meh about them. (Although I definitely like the Foo Fighters-style of this song better than their last track, “We’ve Got a Situation Here.”) If they weren’t a supergroup, would anyone care? Why does already being famous earn you the right to now be mediocre?

Meanwhile, the group has unveiled the cover art for their debut, Ironiclast. And I’m looking at this thing, and I’m thinking, “Gee, this looks familiar.”

And then it hit me! Remember Damnocracy, that very short-lived supergroup from that stupid VH1 reality show Scott Ian did with Sebastian Bach, Ted Nugent, Evan Seinfeld, and Jason Bonham? Of course you do… how could you ever forget? Well, remember what that band’s logo was? Here, I’ll remind you:

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I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that Kerry King was in Megadeth in that band’s earliest days; I don’t think he stayed with the group for more than five or six performances, and obviously never wrote or recorded with them. And while there’s been a lot of bad blood between King and Dave Mustaine in the years since, I guess the now-infamous T.G.I.Friday’s Peace Accord and the subsequent months and months of Slayer’s touring with ‘Deth really paid off, ’cause last night in Los Angeles, King took the stage to perform with Megadeth for the first time in more than twenty-five years.

Here’s footage of MegaKing performing “Rattlehead” last night. In my opinion, this is way cooler than that Big Four Jam that King missed ’cause he was busy with other stuff.

And for fun, here’s footage of King with Megadeth back in 1984, playing “Burnt Offerings.”

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I know what you’re thinking: “Axl got in a room with Gus G.! He must have asked him all about Ozzy and Scream, right?” Actually, no. When I interviewed Gus G. in August, it was, of course, impossible to forget that he was Ozzy’s guitar player — for one thing, he was in town to do Ozzfest, and for another, he was staying at one of the nicest hotels I’ve ever seen, in a suite bigger than the apartment I grew up in, and I had to fight with paparazzi just to get inside the hotel.

But as you know if you read this site regularly, while I’m thrilled that his gig with Ozzy has gotten him lots of extra attention, I’m not really that interested in Scream, and as I understand it, Gus didn’t really have anything to do with the writing of that album anyway.

So while the topic of Ozzy naturally came up during the course of our conversation, what I really wanted to discuss was Days of Defiance, Firewind‘s absolutely epic new — and arguably best — album yet. And, of course, Gus was only too-happy to oblige me.

After the jump, read what Gus had to say about the creation of Days of Defiance, how he writes his guitar solos, Firewind’s lyrical content, dealing with all the extra attention he’s gotten since joining the Team Ozzy, and more.

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For last week’s contest we offered two winners the chance at three Hammers of Misfortune CDs recently reissued by Metal Blade. I quite enjoyed the photo for last week, so let’s see what we’ve got in the way of winning entries:

• aidangerard: “I prefer TRVEBLOOD.”
• Jim: “Bella has really let herself go.”

Shoutout to Rich Hall for another good one: “Hello?? Southern Lord’s web store customer service? I think I got the wrong Twilight shirt?” I’d pick you, Rich, but for some reason I don’t think you actually want these CDs!

This week’s contest celebrates the release of Shadows Fall’s upcoming Madness in Manila Live CD/DVD set — filmed at last year’s show in the Philipines — which hits stores October 25th and you can pre-order here. Check out the live clip of “A Public Execution” from the DVD that we premiered here a couple of weeks back for a taste of the madness that’s in store. Not only will this week’s winner receive an autographed copy of said CD/DVD, but also a nifty Zoom Q3 Handy Video Recorder! Since the below photo is of the SF dudes themselves we’re asking you guys to submit Shadows Fall-related captions, and of course to make ‘em funny. To win, just come up with the funniest caption to the below photo, and remember to use a real email address (or post it with your comment if you’re using FB Connect)!

I was seriously excited to hear Silence Is Betrayal, the forthcoming album from San Francisco’s First Blood. Politically charged and heavier than heavy, the new record is a furtherance of the headstrong hardcore found on 2006′s Killafornia that will appeal to fans of Hatebreed, Madball, and Terror, the latter of which once included First Blood frontman Carl Schwartz. I’m stoked to be premiering “Enslaved”, one of the previously unheard cuts off Silence Is Betrayal, on the site today. Check out the stream of this metallic sumbitch below.

Silence Is Betrayal drops November 9th on Bullet Tooth Records. Pre-order it.

-GS

Before there were blogs there were these things called magazines, and the only metal magazine we still get excited about reading every month is Decibel. Here’s managing editor Andrew Bonazelli.

While the free world breathlessly awaits the results of Decibel editor-in-chief Albert Mudrian’s NLCS bet with Exhumed frontman Matt Harvey — and even down 3-1, it’s way too early to start taunting the boss with “black black black black number ooooooone” — the rest of team dB has moved on to give you a Very Special December issue.

Yes, that’s one of extreme music’s most polarizing mugs on the cover. (You know what, let’s say “polarizing figure”; there’s nothing polarizing about Phil’s facial expressions, which all clearly fucking rule.) As usual, the man has a billion things going on. Sadly, one of them is not the fourth Down record (yet), although a new Arson Anthem slab and the 20^th anniversary of Cowboys From Hell are pretty sick placeholders. For a dude that’s been somewhat, um, contentious in interviews, Anselmo is crazy gregarious with our man J. Bennett. Like Mustaine or Lars, whether you love or hate the guy, he gives great copy. And I promise that the anecdotes about early Pantera — especially pertaining to Seagal-caliber bar pummelings — will do you right.

As for the rest of the issue, there’s plenty more radness that you can see for yourself on the cover, but one thing you can’t that I’ll spoil right now is Rod Smith’s review of the Amphetamine Reptile 25^th anniversary show. Shannon Selberg of the Cows is wearing mousetraps as earrings. ‘Nuff said. This fucker will be on newsstands next week, but we wouldn’t mind picking up our Secret Santa anal beads before Black Friday, so help us out by grabbing it early here.

Oh yeah, if you’re getting pumped about the Incantation Onward to Golgotha Hall of Fame shows that I’ve been babbling about the last month or so, the New York one just moved. It’s no longer at Rebel on November 20, but Club Europa, which evidently is here:

Europa Night Club
98 Meserole Ave. (corner of Manhattan Ave.)
Brooklyn, NY 11222

Shit will rule. Snap ’em up.

-AB

Like the man said, you can buy yourself a copy of the December 2010 issue of Decibel here. But we’ll love you better if you just go ahead and buy yourself a full subscription. Trust us, it’s totally worth it!!!

We’re not huge punk-lovers here at Metalisbad but this certainly seems worthy of mention…

The (anti?) super group OFF! is made up of Keith Morris (Circle Jerks, Black Flag) with Steven McDonald (Redd Kross), Dmitri Coats (Burning Brides) and Mario Rubalcaba (Earthless, Rocket from the Crypt, Hot Snakes). Vice Records is putting out four EPs in a box as a debut in November, and the first 7″ came out last week.

OFF! will play a CMJ show TONIGHT at Club Europa in their first NYC appearance ever (with Cerebral Ballzy).

More vids after the hoo-hah…

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Last night at NYC’s Mercury Lounge, after Earthless tore my face open (psychedelically speaking) and I spent the entire duration of Iron Age’s set talking shit at the bar trying to wingman one of the dudes in Priestess with a kinda lame chick, Disembodied stepped up to the plate and took an enormously heavy and dissonant dump all over the crowd.  Musically speaking.  In a good way.

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Krieg are the odd man out in the USBM spectrum. “True” almost to a fault, they lack the oppressive, claustrophobic bleakness of Xasthur, the Phil Spector-ian walls of blackened madness of Leviathan, or the psychedelic mindfuckery of Nachtmystium. The few times I’ve tried to get into Krieg, nothing jumped out at me. And yet, after hearing Krieg frontman/mastermind Imperial’s serrated vocals on Twilight’s Monument to Time End this year, it shook something in me. There’s a fundamental rawness to it that can’t be replicated in silly backyard corpsepaint GIFs. And that rawness is all over Krieg’s latest, the chilling The Isolationist. It’s got all the black metal hallmarks, sure, but they’re all tweaked to provide maximum effectiveness. Droning and repetitive to some ears, to others, it’s all about mood. And that mood is suffocating and bleak. It’s relentless hideousness is truly a thing to behold, and with it, Krieg ably prove themselves as major contributors to US black metal.

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Can I get a “heck yes!” from all the nerds in the house?

Heck yes!

Reader Daniel Borbet just sent us a link to an event posted at the website of NYC’s Best Buy Theater — formerly the not-at-all-more-appealingly-named Nokia Theater — for a Symphony X show with Nevermore, Soilwork, Powerglove and Blackguard in tow. Yowza, that’s some serious nerdage right there! The show is booked for April 22, 2011 which seems like an eternity from now, but such is the case when foreign bands like Soilwork are involved and visas need to be procured, flights needs to be booked, and so on and so forth.

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Jason Suecof is a genius. I don’t mean that in the metaphorical way; he really must be one the smartest guys in all of metal. I remember the “making of” documentary DVD packaged with some album he produced a few years back [Chimaira, I think] in which he picked up a guitar and started ad-libbing a parody of whatever band it was right on the spot, complete with riffs, leads and lyrics. He’s also fucking hilarious, as anyone who’s ever met him or seen interviews with him can attest to. And best of all, he’s got a sense of humor about himself.

While Suecof’s twisted combination of talent and comedy don’t often intermingle on the finished records that you hear, he’s done a series of parody songs over the years that show off both qualities and probably took him all of 5 minutes to write and record. The first, “Shadows Balls,” was — duh, a Shadows Fall parody — that perfectly nails all of that bands trademark sounds in one song. Now he’s decided to let the world in on an Ill Niño parody he tracked back in 2005, and, no surprise, it’s both spot on and fucking hysterical. Stream “Dill Piño” over at Gun Shy Assassin. I suppose that October of 2010 is a fine time to let this song out of the bag, as Ill Niño are about to drop a new record on leading independent label VICTORY RECORDS.

Yeah, you heard that chorus correctly: “You make me feel so real, so fucking unreal /  You make feel so unreal that I feel real.” Perfect.

-VN

We’ve been trucking away on the Readers’ Choice column for over a year, and I’ve come to realize that I’ve been using it to write primarily about unsigned bands which wasn’t necessarily the idea in the first place. So, welcome to Unsigned and Unholy, a column devoted exclusively to the unsigned bands of our readers, their friends, and the bands in their local scenes.

There are just way too many fantastic unsigned bands out there today to ignore. The truth of the matter is that the only thing that differentiates signed bands from their unsigned counterparts is that they haven’t autographed a contract. Gone are the days when record labels were the sole gatekeepers of good music; the playing field has been leveled. So, without further ado…

• Odyssey: Another band from the growing list that subscribes to the notion that the bass is an instrument that should be prominently featured in the mix, which I can wholeheartedly get behind. Proggy and technical — but not too much of either — instrumetal that doesn’t fall into the trappings of any currently hot sub-genres (read: no metalcore, deathcore, djent, thrash or even plain old death metal).
• Soul Cycle: Kinda like Killswitch Engage without the vocals if KsE hadn’t started writing the same album over and over starting with End of Heartache. But I say “kinda like KsE” because it is only sorta “kinda”… they’ve definitely got their own sound.
• Ypres: These guys describe themselves as ambidjent, but I beg to differ. There are trace elements of the djent sound, but there’s really so much more in the way of plain old instrumental metal. Their new album Returning We Hear the Larks is a concept piece about World War I… in whatever way an instrumental piece can be conceptual. [Thanks: Dan Wolfson]

-VN

Okay, so what videos have debuted since last night? Let’s find out!

First up we have “Charmer” from This or The Apocalypse, which our bro-bros at Metal Injection debuted. I gotta say, the choice of back-lighting the guitarist during his solo so you can’t see him playing was a excellent one. I mean, who wants to see a guitar player shred? This is metal, not fucking flamenco. Am I right or am I right?

[crickets]

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